


Worthless

by ReaperShadCat



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReaperShadCat/pseuds/ReaperShadCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After winning the game, the trolls have assimilated into life on Earth. All of them, that is, except for one Sollux Captor, who thinks both he and Earth culture are about as useful as a corpse - cue one Karkat Vantas to attempt to convince him otherwise.</p><p>(My only warnings: Fluffy and possibly a tad OOC.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worthless

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fanfic I've written in five years, so I hope it's not too bad for all of you! Enjoy!  
> Please forgive the rather long paragraphs. I like paragraphs.  
> ( Also, I love the word "transmogrified" :P )

Sollux Captor hated everything. He hated this world, hated everyone who lived in it, hated all the other trolls who acted like it was no big deal. It wasn’t a seething hatred filled with cursing and rude hand gestures, no – it was a loathing, a grand, marvelous, all-encompassing displeasure with his very state of being that had forced him into his current position, that being a half-curled heap of troll on the floor in front of his couch covered in the grime of days upon days without showers or sleep. At this point, it really didn’t matter – sure, they won, whatever. What was the point of winning, though, if everything about them just went back to the same worthlessness present at the beginning?

He supposed some of them were better off. Aradia, with her still rather new state of living, was a bundle of joy and happiness and adventure movies and travels to other countries. Tavros, weak as he was, had new prosthetic legs which were lighter and far more maneuverable than thick metal ones, and new confidence to boot. This planet was crawling with beasts for him to befriend, he might as well have been a fairytale princess. Nepeta was off doing.. whatever it was that she did, Sollux wasn’t sure, but he’d heard no complaints from that direction, so he assumed she was having a good old time collecting cats or something. Kanaya was busy with making clothes for humans who were enamored with her fashion, Terezi was her usual tongue-happy self, Vriska was still as bitchy as ever, Equius was still making robots, Gamzee was probably high on every available narcotic on the planet, Eridan was probably wallowing in his typical loneliness but doing quite well otherwise, and Feferi was off being bubbly and friendly and loving everything about the planet they now inhabited. And then there was Karkat.

All the other trolls seemed to be doing just fine with adjusting to the strange, almost surreal culture that was human culture, except for one Karkat Vantas. He was not just adjusting. He was thriving, soaking himself in freakish human ways of life. The bitch. He created this world, of course he would be enjoying it. He was the only one. He alone reached for the handle of the door to this world. He alone felt that blue spark travel between his hand and this mass of raw universe willing to be shaped by his every whim, and he alone had been prevented from experiencing it as it had twisted itself into his world, HIS goddamn world that HE created and no one else. He was happy here, a strange sight to everyone, but still a sight they were indeed seeing. He smiled more. He yelled less. He even seemed to be enjoying that dumb thing that humans called love, and probably involving humans too, or so Sollux had heard. Karkat was the star, the hero, the one who saved everyone, and he was the god here, the creator of this world, and all the rest of them were just the sideshow, the band that played the opening act that no one actually came to see.

For Sollux, life was back to the way it was before they had even played the damn game. No, wait - it was worse. His damn lisp was back, his freak eyesight was back, his complete and total insecurity was back. His life currently consisted of computers, servers, and cheetos, and not a single thing else. He stayed up night after night, coding, hacking, tinkering with computers and routers and vmware and operating systems and goddamn annoying programming languages that didn’t do what he wanted them to and graphics cards and a mess of wires and cables that would cause the fire marshal to faint in the event that he would ever visit the Captor residence. Despite all that, despite however apeshit bananas he might be at computers, at coding, at technology, Sollux realized that his life amounted to virtually nothing. What good was hacking? That wouldn’t get him a job, an education, a life. He had money, but it all stemmed from ads on his numerous websites and fees other people payed him to use his servers for their Runescape or World of Warcraft or Halo or whatever the fuck they used them for. Sollux was trapped in the realization that he was, indeed, nothing.

And so he had stopped eating. Being the middle of the summer, it was an absolutely gorgeous 104 degrees outside, and not too far below that inside, as all Sollux had in regards to temperature control was a shitty window AC unit that only sometimes worked if he smacked it hard enough. A lack of sleep mixed with a lack of nourishment and minimal hygiene had piled together with his immense self-loathing to create the heap of useless grey flesh he was now, waiting to run out of strength completely, waiting to run out of air, waiting to just up and die here on the sticky, soda-drenched carpet. He could see it on the news already – “Alien boy found dead in apartment, body preserved in Mountain Dew, more at eleven.” He imagined the camera panning his dark apartment, computers still running, zooming in slowly on his body, surrounded by a puddle of yellow blood, a female announcer talking over the footage as if it were as shocking as a video of a mitochondria swimming around in a dish under a microscope. That’s how much they would care. That’s how much anyone would care. That’s how much everyone at any given point in time cared for the little, worthless life of Mr. Sollux “I-Can-See-The-Future-Except-Now-I-Can’t-Because-We’re-On-Earth-And-Everything-Sucks” Captor.

Suddenly there was a loud, uncomfortable noise coming from somewhere outside his apartment. Sollux was honestly too weak and too uninterested to investigate, even when it happened again, and again, and once more, and yet one MORE time, until Sollux’s brain stopped being in “Fuck-My-Life” mode and realized someone was knocking on his door and shouting something which was inaudible to Sollux through the walls of his apartment and the blurriness of his current mental state. Despite that, however, he could tell from the vigor of the knocking and the frantic, constant stream of ragelike noises coming from his would-be guest that it was 97% likely to be Karkat.

“Fuck off,” Sollux half groaned, half yelled at the door. “I don’t want to fucking thee you right now, KK. Come back when you read my goddamned obituary.”

“LISTEN, YOU HELPLESS PIECE OF FUCK, IF YOU DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR I AM GOING TO BREAK IT OPEN WITH MY BARE HANDS AND I AM NOT GOING TO PAY YOU FOR A NEW ONE. I WILL COME INTO YOUR APARTMENT AND PUT MY SHOE THROUGH EVERY ONE OF YOUR SHITTY SERVERS UNTIL THE NOOKSNIFFING MANCHILDREN THAT PAY YOU FOR THEM COME OVER HERE TO HELP ME SMASH YOUR UGLY TEETH IN AND MAKE YOU A HOTPOCKET TO SHOVE IN YOUR FACE, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Sollux could only lie there and listen to his wall of angry text as it erupted at him from the outside. He didn’t have even the strength to cry back that Karkat, you dumbfuck, the door is unlocked, did you even attempt to open it at all?

“ OPEN! THE! GOD! DAMNED! DOOR!” Karkat shrieked, his voice reaching such a pitch that it was high and raspy, rattling the handle so hard that it ended up turning and opening the door and he fell forward, grasping the door handle for support, being swung in a half-circle and smacking the side of his head against the wall and a table with a loud bang. The troll gave out a shrill roar of pain, grasping his head where his horn (and a considerable amount of his skull) had made contact with the small table, flailing about in a cloud of expletives and knocking over a fern. Had Sollux not been currently already perishing, he would probably have ended up killing himself by laughing too hard to actually breathe.

Karkat eventually managed to collect his rampaging self into a more palatable package of being bent over, hands on his knees, huffing in pain and anger with a look of sheer loathing on his face. It had been a long time since Sollux had seen Karkat in such a negative mood, and honestly, it kind of made his heart tingle a bit with the giddy idea that maybe, just maybe, Karkat hadn’t transmogrified from troll to human quite yet. Karkat huffed loudly and stomped over to the tangle of almost-dead limbs that was Sollux with a force that the yellow one was pretty sure was unnecessarily loud. He bent down over the pathetic troll-heap, examining the sickly face of the apartment’s resident self-deprecating idiot, his eyes shimmering with a red-hot rage and a small twinge of something Sollux could not quite think of a word for. Soon the Gemini found himself being dragged up onto the couch off the floor, his air conditioner turned to maximum, and a blanket over him, as the crabby troll stomped his way into the kitchen to find something, anything that wasn’t an incarnation of heart disease disguised as a food item to shove down the other’s throat. He returned shortly with what looked to be some sort of a “sandwich” consisting of a piece of cheese, a single leaf of lettuce, and way too much lunchmeat, covered in some sort of a sauce that was sort of vinegar-smelling, although Sollux was pretty sure he’d never owned anything of the sort. The sandwich was accompanied by a glass of water and two pills, which Sollux recognized as sleeping pills, the kind he’d been prescribed but never bothered to take, instead having shoved them into his medicine cabinet as far from his face as possible. He groaned, but was honestly too weak to protest as Karkat started to hastily shove the food into his mouth as if there were 10 seconds left before it exploded and murdered the both of them. Sollux chewed reluctantly, eventually finishing off the sandwich, before finally mustering up the strength to complain.

“Goddammit, KK. Why the fuck did you come over here?” he whispered as Karkat tried to unceremoniously lodge the sleeping pills between Sollux’s stupid fangs, the recipient jerking his head away whenever the imposing hand became too close, Karkat gripping onto his body with every available limb to keep him from escaping. “I don’t need you, ok? I don’t need anyone, and no one needth me, tho you thould jutht leave and let me lie back on the floor.” He curled his face into a look of disgust. “Theriouthly, though, latht time thith happened you didn’t give a thingle flying fuck and thuddenly now that you’re all fucking emothionth and happy earth bullthit you miraculouthly thtarted to give a rat’th athh about me? Real thmooth, dude. I’ll remember how much of a great fucking betht friend you were when I do manage to lie down and die. I’ll tell everyone in earth heaven or whatever jutht how much you fucking cared about me before we all got thent to thith poor exuthe of a univerthe.”

Karkat glared down at him, about to open his mouth to shout at the lisping boy beneath him, when Sollux continued. “Oh, that’th right. You made thith univerthe, didn’t you? Goddamn I’m really thorry about the fact that it’th horrible. Maybe we can play again and you’ll get it right nectht time? Or maybe I can finally actually die inthtead of being a uthelethh pieth of thit that doeth nothing but drag everyone down and act like a panthy while everyone ith making betht fucking friendth with the earthlingth that are five thouthand timeth cooler than anything I could ever be. I’m thorry I’m thuch a dithapointment to you, KK. Why don’t you jutht go back to fucking that happy blue athhole John you’re alwayth gabbing your fangth off about? I’m pothitive he’th the cooletht thing that ever happened to you, ithin’t he?”

He strained his voice to make it sound as crackling and raspy as Karkat’s. “Oh look, Tholluckth, look at thith blue bathtard, the one with the fucking wind god powerth, ithin’t he the betht? Don’t you think he’th tho cool with hith awethome wind powerth? Gee, Tholluckth, don’t you want to fuck him? No? Well, good, becauth I’m gonna get my fat cranky athh all over that and you can’t have any. In fact, go die, Thol, you’re uthelethh and I’m the leader tho I declare that you’re uthelethh and a wathte of air!”

“Shut the FUCK up, Sollux.”

“Oh, I know, onthe we meet up with thethe human kidth and get trapped on their planet, then I’ll pretend to thtart paying attention to that nookthtain who I call my betht friend! Maybe then he’ll forget how much of a wathte he ith tho I can-“

“Shut UP! Shut UP, you little bitch!” Karkat screamed, his voice cracking. “Stop! Stop, I-I..”

Karkat dropped the sleeping pills, and the next thing Sollux new, the Cancer had his arms wrapped around him, sobbing into his shirt. “I felt like such an asshole! Do you have any idea? Do you have any idea how much it SCARED me when I found out you almost died the first time? Fuck you! That wasn’t John’s fault, you fuckass! It…” He tightened his grip on the Gemini’s shoulders. “It was my fault. It was my fault and I’m sorry, okay? I fucked up. I thought you were just being a typical mopey bastard, and then you go and try to kill yourself! Do you have any idea how scared I was? How scared everyone was? The fuck would we have done without you, Sollux? We would have sit on our asses and hoped that someone would show up and magically fix our computers when they stopped working so that we wouldn’t die on that fucking asteroid in the middle of space, that’s what. You aren’t useless, asshole.”

“I’m uthelethh now.” Sollux retorted. “No one’th gonna die from a lack of internet anymore. Hell, thome of uth don’t even log in anymore. ED’th been offline for who the fuck knowth how long, he’th probably in jail for trying to grab too many athheth or thomething, and you.. you don’t go online mutth anymore either.” He buried his face into Karkat’s side. “I’m lonely, KK. I’m tho lonely I think my blood ith going to turn purple and I’m going to thprout gillth.”

Karkat shifted his position a bit. “Yeah, well, he’s with Feferi now.”

Sollux sunk backwards a bit. “You’re kidding me.” His brow furrowed into an expression of disgust. “You’re fucking kidding me, KK. Thee? Even that dethperate fithfathe ith lethh lonely than me. …and he’th hooked up with my old matethprit. Fuck my life.”

“Fuck him. Are you really going to try and kill yourself because fucking ERIDAN has a girlfriend and you don’t?” Karkat scoffed. “I thought you wouldn’t give up that easily, but clearly I was wrong and you’re even more of a social retard than I thought you were.”

The Gemini looked at the other’s eyes, searching them for what Karkat truly thought about him, only finding the strange, milky glimmer of that unidentifiable emotion from before, complimented by brows curled forward into an expression somewhere between rage and concern.

“I’ll never find a matethprit.” Sollux sighed. “Ethpethially not on thith damn planet where everyone wantth “love” or whatever that bullthit ith that everyone conthtantly goeth on about.”

“Asshole, don’t diss it ‘till you try it.”

“And you have? Really, KK? You know what love feelth like? Or do you only think you do from all thothe dumb movieth you watch?”

“Trust me. I know.”

“Really. What’th it like, then?”

Karkat closed his eyes, pausing for a moment, before leaning forward and brushing the tip of his nose up to Sollux’s, running a hand through his hair. Sollux jerked away at first, but Karkat opened his eyes and there was just that fucking glimmer of the sadness of rejection and whatever emotion it was there and it was burning a hole straight into Sollux’s mind and infecting his heart with its softness, its warmth, and he relaxed, intoxicated with this strange new feeling that had never existed to him before, leaning forward to touch their noses together again. Karkat trailed his nose up the bridge of the other’s and back, gently, softly, with light little huffs and hums and possibly even the beginning of a smile. The Cancer pulled Sollux close to him, nuzzling every part of him softly, and then lightly, ever, ever so lightly planting a soft kiss on the other’s lips, remaining there for a moment before slowly moving back to admire his work, eyes agleam with -that- emotion that Sollux realized was welling up within his chest.

“Like that,” Karkat whispered, and Sollux just stared into those soft eyes, those eyes that he usually saw hard and sharp, boiling with anger, those eyes that right now he just wanted to curl up inside and never, ever leave.

“Wow.” Sollux said, realizing his arms were wrapped around Karkat and his hands were in his hair.

“Promise me you’ll stop being a suicidal fuckass, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Look at me.” Karkat snapped, but not too harshly, lowering his face so that his eyes pierced straight into Sollux’s. “Promise me.”

“I promithe.” Sollux whispered, a small grin appearing on his face. “You know, I… I think I can get uthed to thith love thing. I think.. I think I love you, KK.”

“I think I love you too, idiot.”

There was no more need for sleeping pills. Sollux closed his eyes and snuggled close, heart aflutter from the warmth from Karkat’s body, and they both drifted off to sleep.

Maybe both Sollux and these Earth emotions weren’t so worthless after all.


End file.
